Hank imagines himself breaking into the Hot Pockets factory to steal their secret recipes and instruction manuals in order to help us understand how the processes known as DNA transcription and translation allow our cells to build proteins.

Hank introduces us to the relatively new field of evolutionary developmental biology, which compares the developmental processes of different organisms to determine their ancestral relationship, and to discover how those processes evolved. ...

Hank gets real with us in a discussion of evolution - it's a thing, not a debate. Gene distribution changes over time, across successive generations, to give rise to diversity at every level of biological organization.

Hank introduces us to the "simplest" of the animals, complexity-wise: beginning with sponges (whose very inclusion in the list as "animals" has been called into question because they are so simple) and finishing with the most complex ...

Hank introduces us to ourselves by taking us on a journey through the fascinatingly diverse phyla known as chordata. And the next time someone asks you who you are, you can give them the facts: you're a mammalian amniotic tetrapodal ...

Hank takes us on a trip around the body - we follow the circulatory and respiratory systems as they deliver oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from cells, and help make it possible for our bodies to function.

Hank introduces us to the framework of our bodies, our skeleton, which apart from being the support and protection for all our fleshy parts, is involved in many other vital processes that help our bodies to function properly.

Hank fills us in on the endocrine system - the system of glands which produce and secrete different types of hormones directly into the bloodstream to regulate the body's growth, metabolism, and sexual development & function.

Hank lets us in on the meaning of life, at least from a biological perspective - it's reproduction, which answers the essential question of all organisms: how do I make more of myself? So, sex, how does it work?

Hank veers away from human anatomy to teach us about the (mostly) single-celled organisms that make up two of the three taxonomic domains of life, and one of the four kingdoms: Archaea, Bacteria, and Protists. They are by far the most ...

Hank introduces us to nonvascular plants - liverworts, hornworts & mosses - which have bizarre features, kooky habits, and strange sex lives. Nonvascular plants inherited their reproductive cycle from algae, but have perfected it to the ...

Hank introduces us to one of the most diverse and important families in the tree of life - the vascular plants. These plants have found tremendous success and the their secret is also their defining trait: conductive tissues that can take ...

Hank gets into the dirty details about vascular plant reproduction: they use the basic alternation of generations developed by nonvascular plants 470 million years ago, but they've tricked it out so that it works a whole lot differently ...

Death is what fungi are all about. By feasting on the deceased remains of almost all organisms on the planet, converting the organic matter back into soil from which new life will spring, they perform perhaps the most vital function in the ...

Hank introduces us to ecology - the study of the rules of engagement for all of us earthlings - which seeks to explain why the world looks and acts the way it does. The world is crammed with things, both animate and not, that have been ...